


lullaby for a blue night

by tinydragon (tiny_dragon)



Category: Phandom/The Fantastic Foursome (YouTube RPF)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Ghosts, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-04
Updated: 2016-08-04
Packaged: 2018-07-29 08:34:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,591
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7677454
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tiny_dragon/pseuds/tinydragon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which Phil is the ghost of Dan's childhood best friend and maybe they both need to move on.</p>
            </blockquote>





	lullaby for a blue night

Life is at a dead-end. Maybe. Possibly.

And, like, Dan doesn’t want it to be like that. He doesn’t want to see the world as grey slates and motion pictures moving in black and white image only. It’s just. Sometimes it’s a little hard to look at anything other than the black-print block writing that tells you things won’t work out, although they probably will.

Dan, you might say, is in a slump.

 

He feels as though if he put some actual effort in there might be some way to distance himself from a sensation of apathy and find a feeling that attracts more moonlight than it does shadows, but trying has become a tiresome effort as of late.

And like. He tries. There’s a world inside the back of his mind that is filled with gutter ghosts and space shuttles, and he’s trying very hard to step inside a world in which there is light of every colour and jazz hands and a silver lining on every rain cloud that conveniently filters the few rain drops that pass through bright orange.

Sometimes, Dan tells Phil about his dreams. He turns them into stories, and Phil likes to listen.

Other times, Dan tells Phil about how much the world feels like a paper cut and how he never quite feels _right_ and he kind of like, wants to stop the planet spinning for a while so he can take a break and remember how to function again. He feels like he belongs even less than Phil does.

Phil tells him not to be so depressing, but -

Well. Phil’s dead. His opinion hardly matters.

::

Dan met Phil when they were twelve years old and the Lesters moved in next door to the Howells.

At first, they didn’t like each other; they were pushed into a forced friendship by their parents, and so Dan would scowl every time Phil’s family would show up and the boys were coaxed together, and Phil would shift awkwardly, unable to ignore the fact that he wasn’t really welcome there. And Dan would roll his eyes, and he’d cause a fuss, but he wasn’t horrible so of course he’d let Phil play video games with him and he’d make a half-arsed attempt to talk to him and he’d offer him apple juice or whatever. Phil irritated Dan with his inability to form coherent sentences, because Dan understood not having social confidence but Dan was hardly a fucking monster, was he, _honestly_.

And then Dan stayed at Phil’s for a long weekend while his parents fucked off to France and he’d thought it was going to be the worst weekend of his life, but actual conversation became kind of important if Dan didn’t want to lose his mind and when Phil got past the stage of re-learning how to talk, he’d actually found he was a pretty cool guy.

And they’d played pranks on Phil’s parents, and on his brother, and on Dan’s. And they’d had a Harry Potter marathon, and every time Phil started to fall asleep Dan would pour lucozade on his face. And they somehow became best friends.

And when Dan went home, the next day after school the first thing he did was knock on Phil’s door, his hands in his pockets and trying to look like he didn’t give a shit (he did) as he asked if Phil was in, and ’d'you wanna play Mario?’

That was that, really.

::

In the summer in which they’re fourteen, Phil kisses a girl at the house party of a boy in their class and Dan feels jealousy from the tips of his toes up to his shoulders, latching onto his bones and burning behind his nails.

He tells himself it’s because Sarah’s pretty, obviously.

(But when she approaches him two months later in school, whispering with red cheeks that she kind of likes him a bit, he awkwardly turns down her request to the cinema and rushes off to find Phil.)

::

Six months after that, Dan goes out with a girl and he holds her hand and he kisses her lips just to prove to himself and the boys at school who call him poison words that he _can_.

And. Like. It’s not awful.

And she’s pretty. And Dan likes her, and he likes kissing her. He’s not lying to himself. It’s just, when she kisses him, he kind of wishes she was somebody else.

::

“What is it with you?” Phil asks, exasperated because - okay. Maybe Dan’s being just a little bit unreasonable. “Is it because you have a problem with me? You know - liking… boys?”

“No!” Dan argues. “It’s not, it’s just - you keep ditching me, okay, I’d be pissed off if it were a boy _or_ a girl. I don’t care, Phil.”

Phil looks at him knowingly, eyes kind of like a crystal ball. Dan knows that Phil knows, but Phil’s got a boyfriend with a stupid name that Dan doesn’t like to say, and neither of them will put their feelings into words.

“Okay,” he says. “Okay, good.”

“Good?” Dan repeats. He scoffs, crosses his arms, and Phil looks upset.

Dan resolutely ignores the sharp pangs that he feels in his chest when Phil looks like he’s upset. He ignores the strange, distant urge to take care of him, to make him feel better -

“Well, I’m sorry,” Phil says. “I can’t cancel my plans now, can I?”

“You cancelled on me.”

Phil grins. “Aw, is Dan jealous?”

\- and Dan’s heart thumps almost painfully because this, this is the closest they have ever come to acknowledging the _thing_ , the elephant in the room, what Dan feels but desperately fears to say, and the thought of it hanging over his head like lightning lurches his stomach and makes him feel sick and makes him spot every single crack in the foundations of the galaxy, and he wonders when it’s all going to fall down on him, crushing in his dusty bones.

“No,” Dan grumbles. “Why would I give a fuck?”

“Chill,” Phil says. “I was joking.”

Dan’s silent, gnawing on his lip, and Phil’s staring and Dan’s skin is clawing because. He knows. He knows, he must know, he can’t know. Dan can’t bear the thought of him knowing. It makes him feel sick to his stomach.

“I just,” Dan says, voice clear-cut, but still shaking somehow. A tremor, an earthquake, a little boy in too-big shoes with a secret. “You’re my best friend, yeah? I don’t want you to replace me.”

Phil rolls his eyes - something like relief shines within the looking glass - and he smiles.

“You’re my best friend, too,” Phil says. “Duh. I could never replace you. Stop being stupid.”

And Dan does what he says.

(No he doesn’t. But he hides it better.)

::

They kiss once. Only once.

A kiss when they’re sharing Dan’s squashed up single bed in the corner of his room with a tattered band poster half falling down the wall. It’s three am and they’re sixteen and they’re stone sober, and. It just kind of happens.

Their lips meet in the shadows, and neither of them are laughing, neither of them are smiling when they touch at an awkward angle in the dark, and Dan closes his eyes.

It feels like hours -

It lasts seconds.

“Goodnight,” Phil whispers. Dan wonders if he’s dreaming, bathed in silhouettes and blurring gold street lamps streaming amber glows in through the window.

They fall asleep, and they never talk about it again.

::

In sixth form, Dan spends a whole morning in the nurse’s office throwing up into a waste paper bin before he’s given permission to go home. And then he repeats the same motion, puking up what little he can draw from the contents of his stomach and crying, choking out tears and not eating and not revising for his A-level exams while his mother looks worried and tries to hide her own sadness.

Phil Lester: beloved son, best friend and creator of star lines, dead at seventeen.

A car accident, a wrong turn, a boy late for school with rust in his organs and a woman who didn’t slow down in time -

Nobody is to blame, is the verdict. But still, a woman will be forever unable to live with the fact that her hands on the wheel and her feet on the break drew the life out of a young boy’s eyes; a mother and a father grieve over the early grave of their blue-bright child, and a teenage boy realises what love is as it’s ripped away.

Love, and loss, and grief and the grave all go together, and the funeral is hell, and Dan forgets what it’s like to feel okay for a while.

His best friend is dead. He makes a note to self: tell the children not to fall in love.

::

The Lesters move away.

Dan’s tied down to a school that haunts him and hallways that mock him and a broken city soundtrack that jumps on track fourteen (every time he walks past the park where they used to play footie; every time he passes the old music shop; every time he catches a reflection of Phil’s memory. So. Like. Everywhere. The CD never works, it’s fucking broken.)

He can’t blame them for wanting to get out. He can’t blame his parents for the fact that he can’t.

Dan decides that when he leaves home he’s going to move far, far away.

(To the moon, perhaps. If possible, please.)

::

The first time Dan walks into his kitchen to find Phil sat up on the counter swinging his legs back and forth like they used to, he passes out.

He wakes up to find his best friend looming over him (his best friend; dead at seventeen, remember?) and he has a near fucking heart attack. His head is aching and he’s sure he’s gone insane, but it’s the middle of the night and if he wakes his parents up with the claims that his dead best friend is eating the cheerios in the kitchen he’ll surely be carted off.

“No one else can see me,” Phil confides in him, there’s an ice pack against Dan’s head and the soft lull of a non-broken album is playing distantly on the old stereo set. “It’s good that finally somebody can.”

“I don’t get it,” Dan keeps saying. “I don’t get it. How are you here? You’re _dead_.”

“Yeah, Dan,” Phil laughs bitterly. “Thanks for the reminder.”

It occurs to Dan that Phil probably doesn’t like being dead very much. He holds his tongue after that.

“My parents moved away,” Phil’s voice is strange, like - it’s angry and empty and sad and shadowed by doubt because his family are gone and he is dead and Dan is the only person who can see him. The only person in the world.

“They missed you too much,” Dan tells him.

“And what about you?” Phil asks him, looks him directly in the eye - things are different now, Dan realises - “did you miss me?”

“I missed you more than I thought it was possible to,” Dan admits. “I. Everything felt wrong and now it feels right again. Even though you’re, what, a ghost? You being here but not here, you being a fucking ghost or a spirit or whatever you are, somehow that seems more natural than you being dead.”

He pauses for a long moment: people live, people die, buildings collapse in a flurry of flame and somebody drowns and bricks are set in paving stone as history happens and Dan is living it, breathing it, and -

“So. Yeah. I missed you a lot. Please don’t be dead, Phil, please don’t be dead.”

“If ghosts could cry,” Phil says, but there’s a choking rhythm in the back of his throat and he makes a strangled sound like he should be pushing out tears. He doesn’t cry, though, and he doesn’t finish his sentence.

::

And. Like.

Phil has nowhere to go, so he sticks with Dan. Follows him around the house and down empty streets and to school sometimes and watching him sit in the back of the classroom with dull eyes listening in on the lectures makes Dan feel kind of hollow and a little sick (it also makes him feel safe, which, yeah, probably fucked up, really.)

Nobody else can see Phil, he hadn’t denied that. And neither of them want anybody to think that Dan is insane and so he only talks to Phil when he is alone.

Phil talks to Dan all the time, though - making comments, throwing in his two cents at every opportunity, being a sarcastic little shit to the point where Dan has to fight the urge to just roll his eyes or crack a smile, so as not to look insane. He often ends up with a very pinched expression on his face, but that’s okay. He’s grieving, isn’t, people already think he’s lost it.

Fucking Phil.

And so, Phil stays, stays with Dan because there’s nowhere else for him to go, and neither of them question his entire being (Dan tries; Phil doesn’t want to talk). Phil follows Dan down the street like a second shadow, and Dan clings onto his spirit.

::

Present day: Dan falls out of bed at the sound of the alarm, is late for work, treks into town in the after-hours because he needs some more milk.

He enters the flat at seven forty-five, and finds Phil sprawled out on the sofa watching TV.

“You took your time,” Phil huffs, clearly unimpressed as he folds his arms.

Dan shrugs. “We needed milk.”

“I’m bored.

"You’re always bored.”

“Well, yeah, being dead isn’t a lot of fun, surprisingly,” Phil says, but it’s said teasingly and lightly, an inside joke between the two of them and Dan just shakes his head and smiles.

It’s been five years since the crash, five years since Phil’s lips turned violet underneath bleached hospital lighting and the Lesters moved away and Dan found friendship within the ghost of the boy he has always loved.

(He never told Phil that. It’s too late for anything now.)

It’s been five years, and Dan has long since moved away from the small town in which they’d grown up on the edge of a stupid city he wants to forget the name of. Dan had tried university, dropped out after the first year and now he lives in a London flat working two shitty jobs and trying to like, write a novel or something incredibly half-heartedly. It’s not a great place to live, because his roommate can hardly pay the rent, but Dan isn’t looking to let anybody else move in with him. In the safety of his own home, he can let slip any words from his mouth that he likes, he doesn’t have to check for eyes watching when he makes a sarcastic comment to Phil, or laughs to a joke that he tells. He doesn’t want to be confined into a world where he can only talk to Phil in the depths of darkness and five am light, he doesn’t want to have to watch his back for people watching as he talks to haunted air, because when it’s just the two of them here in their home, sometimes Dan can let himself forget that Phil is really - well, dead.

If Dan lets Phil fade out in the day-time, lets his existence come to a standstill on a daily basis, Phil might start to disappear. Dan might forget.

Dan doesn’t want to forget.

Don’t let him forget.

“Not surprised,” Dan comments, lightly. “What’ve you been doing all day, anyway?”

“I re-watched the first season of How I Met Your Mother,” is what he gets in reply. “Thanks for buying me the box set, by the way, that was cool of you.”

Dan pauses. “Y’ know, I still find it weird. You can like, manipulate objects around you and work a fucking DVD player, but you can’t touch other people.”

“Don’t ask me,” Phil shrugs. “I don’t know. I don’t understand it,” he pauses. “Maybe it’s because objects aren’t like, alive, and neither am I. The DVD player doesn’t have a pulse, does it?” another pause. Dan waits. “But, like. I’d touch you if I could. You know that. I’d give you a hug. You deserve one.”

The DVD player doesn’t have a pulse -

 _i don’t, either_.

Don’t let him forget that, either.

::

Sometimes, Phil disappears for days on end to explore the city.

It’s one of the reasons why they moved to London, although they’d never brought it up. Phil can wonder around the underground, shifting through spaces and hopping on the ends of trains. There’s no risk to it. Nobody can see him. Nobody can tell him not to.

If something goes wrong, Phil can’t die. He can’t even get hurt. He can’t even feel.

(He can’t even feel, Dan, what are you doing wasting your time, your breath, your life - on someone who can’t even feel?)

But Phil disappears for days and Dan is left alone in the flat and he’ll go out and maybe bring a girl home (maybe bring a boy, but only if he’s sure Phil won’t be around to find out) and, like. He lives a little more, perhaps, because it’s hard to really feel like you’re alive when you are in the constant presence of the dead.

It gets lonely, though. And Dan misses Phil when he’s not around. He’s been used to surrounding company from his dead best friend for the past five years and sometimes it feels like he has forgotten what it’s like to be alone, because Phil’s always there. (Usually.)

But it’s times like this when Phil goes away, and there’s no return call to the greeting Dan yells out when he steps foot inside his home and clicks the door shut. There’s no one watching back-to-back episodes of some sitcom on the TV, and there are no pranks for Dan to roll his eyes about and pretend he doesn’t love.

On occasion, Dan will go out, in times like these.

Mostly, he sits around and waits for Phil to come home, and he tries not to think about how it’s probably a little messed up, a little sad, that he spends his time living waiting around for somebody who died long ago.

::

Sometimes Dan recalls the nights spent squashed up in his single bed, back in childhood, back at fourteen summers when Dan could feel his best friend pressed up against him (warmth, body heat), and Phil could feel anything at all.

Now, it’s like -

Things are different, obviously. They have to be, because Dan and Phil can’t touch, and physical contact, physical affection, had always been a part of their friendship. Dan would tackle Phil and Phil would initiate tickle fights, and on long car journeys they used to spend unreasonable amounts of time having thumb wars, arguing over who had won, who had lost.

Touching someone, Dan had always taken it for granted.

He’d taken it for granted at which the ease of being able to reach out and tap somebody lightly on the shoulder, of giving somebody a goodbye hug, of holding hands.

Of holding hands, of holding someone.

Physical affection, for Dan, feels surreal when it’s all happening at once, when he’s on the tube and there are too many people and they’re touching him accidentally, brushing against his shoulder or his arm or his elbow, pushing in and out of the way. Just the thought of being able to feel is strange, odd, when he’s spent an entire weekend cooped up with somebody who’s closest attempt of touch is to make a patch of Dan’s skin feel cooler, icy, for just a single second.

It’s fleeting, in that it occurs all in a rush of kisses-on-cheeks and tight hugs at family reunions every Christmas, or in fragments of one night stands and nights without Phil. Nights where he can be Dan without Phil, when Phil’s gone and Dan lives.

Because he can’t touch Phil, can’t feel Phil, and though Phil curls up beside him at night and watches the space in the sky where the moon should be through the window (he doesn’t sleep, never sleeps), in the morning there is a touch of cold to the mattress that stains through the streets, and Dan still feels as if he’s waking up alone.

::

“You can do it, you know,” Phil says, casually, over breakfast.

Dan looks up from his cereal. “Do what?”

“You know. Get a girlfriend or something. You could do that. It would be okay.”

Dan feels himself stiffen, his shoulders tensing, “I know,” he says. “I know I could. What’s stopping me?”

“Well, me?” Phil blinks. “You’ve got a ghost living with you, Dan, but, like, I don’t have to get in the way. I can be pretty subtle. Or I can just - leave. Sexile me. It’s alright.”

“I don’t want a girlfriend-”

Phil hesitates. “Or maybe a-”

“Don’t.”

(Dan thinks desperately back to a time when Phil’s lips held life, when they kissed in the dark with nobody to tell but the creaks in the floorboards speaking in a shadow language. When Phil’s lips were touched with just one drop of blood, flushing in the dark with a light of love.)

“Okay.”

There’s a kind of quiet around them, and Dan’s still in love -

And Phil is dead. Don’t ever forget that, he tells himself fiercely, don’t ever fucking forget that the man you love is dead, the boy you love is dead.

“I don’t want a girlfriend, Phil,” Dan says.

“Well. Maybe just like, you can bring your friends round, y'know? Work mates or something? You look lonely, sometimes, Dan, and. I don’t want you to feel lonely.”

“I’m not lonely. I’ve got you, haven’t I?”

Something like sadness flickers across Phil’s face.

“I’m going to be late for work,” conversation over.

::

Phil kissed Dan in the dark when they were sixteen years old, and, in hindsight, that was the beginning of the end.

::

  
“Sometimes,” Phil says, tentative, eyes flickering over Dan to search for the warning signs of sadness, of an outburst he won’t know how to deal with. “I think about going to find my parents.”

Dan zones in on the world, at that, everything focusing into clear crystal imagery, and Phil is too pale to be a normal, living person. Before, he’d been half in dreamland, still with sleep dust clotting in the corners of his eyes and he’d been lost in thought but now there is nothing but the echo of a ghostly voice chanting over and over, ‘going to find’, 'sometimes I’, because there is a hidden message in a cryptic code, here. There is a message in a bottle and Dan can feel the metaphorical turquoise tides lap over his toes, and he knows.

'going to find’

'sometimes I’

Sometimes I think about leaving; written between the lines.

“No,” Dan says. Can’t even pretend to find an acceptable way to breach the subject, can’t even -

With Phil, there is no pretending. There has never been any pretending. (That’s a lie). He’s dead, why is Dan catering to the falsehood wishes of a fucking dead man -

His head really, really hurts.

Phil blinks, looks perplexed, pale eyes shadowing. “Excuse me?”

“You can’t leave, Phil.”

“I’m not talking about leaving,” Phil says. “I just want to find my parents.”

“I can find you your parents,” Dan says. “Back home, someone will know where they are. My mum might. I can ring her. Then you’ll know, and you’ll feel better.”

But Phil just shakes his head. “No,” he says. “I want to find them by myself. I wanna - I wanna look for them properly. And see the country. 'Cause now I can.”

“You’ll never find them,” Dan says bitingly. “What are you going to do, slip into every house in the country?”

Phil’s quiet for a long time.

“Even if you do call your mum, I’m going to see them,” he says quietly. “It’s not enough just to know where they are. My brother, too. I want to see them.”

“Why?” Dan’s voice shakes. “They can’t see you.”

“You know that’s not the point-”

“All I know,” Dan says. “Is that I’ve given up my fucking life for you, and now you’re leaving me-”

Phil just scoffs. There is no sympathy here, and the man on the blue moon shakes his head and smiles at Dan’s dizzying dreams.

“You’re not the one who’s dead,” he reminds him, and then he leaves -

But he comes back, he always comes back.

(Dan crosses his fingers.)

::

When Phil had told Dan of his sexuality, they’d been fifteen, and his words had burned.

Dan smiled, said to Phil that it was alright (his heart was racing, palms were sweating, thoughts were everywhere on every planet burning holes into the solar system) and he didn’t care, really, (he cared, he cared, he cared, but not for the reasons Phil would have expected) and they went downstairs and didn’t speak of it again.

Dan doesn’t know why he can’t tell Phil that he likes boys, too. Phil would be the last person not to accept him, wouldn’t he, he could make it alright.

Dan can’t tell his mum, can’t tell his dad, can’t bear to think about it. He doesn’t know why (because it’s okay if he fucks boys, just so long as Phil doesn’t find out.)

And it’s. It’s just a thing, because he’s not ashamed of liking boys, but the people who know him and who knew Phil and Phil himself, if they know the truth they might piece together the spiderweb puzzle that’s endlessly incomplete.

_“You loved him, didn’t you?”_

::

A girl takes interest in him after work on a Thursday. She’s pretty, very pretty. Blue eyes, thin wrists. She drops hint upon hint, and Dan gets it, but he doesn’t make a move. She asks him out for Friday, and he hesitates.

Phil would be alright with this. Phil would want him to do it. Phil would leave the flat just in case, just in case she’d come back after dinner.

But. He can’t, he can’t.

He says no.

::

“Is this what we’re going to do for the rest of your life, then?” Phil asks, snapping them both out of a stoic silence that Dan didn’t know how to shift.

(The emphasis of _your_ makes him cringe.)

“You’re going to work all the time because I can’t pay rent, and refuse to get a roommate to help with the bills, never go on a date or see any friends or call your mum back? You’re miserable, Dan.”

“I’m not miserable,” Dan argues. He’s not. “I’m not.”

“You are,” Phil says. “You’re tired all the time and it’s like you’re still grieving. It’s as if I just died when I’m right here.”

“I know you’re here,” Dan snaps. “I’m not grieving. I can see you. I can-”

Phil doesn’t understand, doesn’t understand the red that’s grazing Dan’s cheeks (out of anger, out of shame) or the sweat on his palms or the ache in his head. He doesn’t understand because Phil can’t feel a single thing, but Dan can, and he can feel the tidal wave of loneliness that both of them feel because they’re both longing to be touched but neither can, and Phil is like Pluto, the forgotten planet frozen over and waiting and hidden away in the depths of the galaxy and Dan can’t stop reaching out to hold onto him and pull him into the radar of the sunlight and -

Space metaphors don’t make sense, but Dan is:

1\. Lonely in a way that is only skin deep.

2\. Stuck in dizzy circles because he doesn’t know how to live with a ghost but he doesn’t know how to live without Phil.

3\. In love with Phil to a point where it actually kind of fucking hurts. And Phil is dead.

“I can see you,” he says, finally, breath laboured and heavy and eyes looking anywhere except for Phil.

“Why do I feel like I’m more alive than you are,” Phil says. And that’s the last thing he says.

(For a while, anyway.)

::

If Dan stands carefully on the edging of the bath, he has a perfect, clear view of the high window of the flat on the very top of the wall shaped like a crescent moon.

And he looks out of the window at all of the blue lights that make the city look like the lost kingdom of Atlantis underneath a sweep of starless black sky.

It feels like a goodbye.

::

“I need to leave,” Phil is saying, and Dan’s head hurts, and he’s not surprised, really; his heart feels like a bruise and fingers tremble and his eyes water and everything feels crushingly overpowering and big because they were seventeen year old idiots when this started and no teenager can take on the forces of life and death; no one can take on the forces of life and death.

“You don’t, you don’t,” Dan says it like it’s a prayer.

“I do,” Phil says, his voice cracks - Dan knows that ghosts can’t feel on the outside, but what about the inside and if so, does Phil feel like something inside is working wrong, too?

(Ghosts can feel on the inside. They always could, and Dan always knew.)

“Why?”

“You’re not living, Dan,” Phil says. It’s a pitiful truth. The room spins. “You act as if you’re more dead than I am.”

“I’m not dead,” Dan says. “I’m not.” Breathe. “I’m here.” Keep breathing. “I’m right here.”

A lullaby catches in his ears, saved from the dawn of time as doctors and nurses pressed down on his veins and his grandma holds him for the first time and sings, and Dan had forgotten this moment until now, but it’s playing in his head like electric light and maybe this is the universe reminding him that he’s alive. That he’s spent the past however long entangled in a love affair with the lack of light at the end of the tunnel, holding hands and singing songs with the Grim Reaper and sharing a bed with a blue-eyed ghost boy, but he’s alive.

“Dan, please,” Phil’s voice cuts through the sphere of music box melodies and Dan is dazed and it hurts but - “I want you to go out, make a friend, make ten. I want you to move on, live where you like. Wherever is easiest _for you_. Get a roommate. Work less. Go on a date. Get a girlfriend, get a boyfriend. Go home - your mum worries. Hang out with your brother. Go for a drink with your dad. Get a dog, get a cat, stay out all night, go back to university, find a new hobby, do everything that makes you glad that you’re alive.”

“I can do that,” Dan says. “I can do it better if you’re with me.”

“You won’t do it at all if you’re with me. We hold each other down.”

“Phil-”

“I’m going to go and see the world and sneak on planes and see if my ears still pop now that I’m dead. I’m going to travel around everywhere and see everything that’s amazing and find my bucket list - I don’t care if it doesn’t count because I’m dead, I’m going to do it. I’m going to find my parents and my brother and go home and see my old house and see my old school and how everything has changed and then I’m going to go far away and I’m never coming back to London again. I’m never going to see you again.”

Pause.

Beat.

“I’m sorry, Dan.”

“Phil, no, please, you can’t, don’t leave me. Please, Phil, don’t leave me-”

“It’ll be better this way,” Phil says, but his voice wavers. “You never stopped grieving. You couldn’t while I was here. It’ll stop hurting, now. I’m going to let you heal. I’m setting you free.”

“That’s not what I want.”

“But it will be,” Phil says. “It will be someday.”

Dan can feel the weight of salted tears in his eyes, but, like - he knows. He knows that this is for the best, somehow, and it hurts like fucking _hell_  but somehow, somehow it’s maybe what they’re meant to do.

“I loved you, you know that?” he says, quietly - he wishes for nothing more than to be able to kiss Phil, just gently, just quickly. To hug him, cuddle him close, touch him one last time. Hold his hands, softly squeeze down a small weight on his fingertips. To feel alive. “I always loved you.”

“I loved you, too,” Phil says. He pauses. “Love you. I mean.”

“Yeah, me too,” Dan echoes. “Love you.”

Phil can’t hold his hands, Phil cannot touch - but he moves his fingers against Dan’s anyway, and Dan can’t feel the warmth of a person’s beating heart, but he can feel the icy, ghostly presence of something, and maybe that’s more than he’d ever hoped for.

“Goodbye, Dan,” Phil says, a watery smile - can ghosts cry?

(And if so, what colour are their tears?)

“I love you. Thank you.”

Phil leaves, and the sky doesn’t fall down. Dan stays stood in the same position for thirty-seven minutes. The city does not crumble, but the lights are burning blue -

The lullaby plays until morning.


End file.
